Mike Tobacco and his girlfriend Debbie Stone have gone to the local lover’s lane to make out. Suddenly, they spot a strange glowing object falling down from the sky. They’re not the only ones who saw that, as the farmer Gene Green decides to find the impact site as he believes it to be Halley’s Comet. Well, he finds something quite different. A large circus tent has been raised in the place where the “comet“ landed, and the poor farmer and his dog are captured by aliens looking like clowns. What they are? Killer Klowns, of course! Mike and Debbie arrive at the place and decide to enter the strange-looking circus, and find themselves in a bizarre place with an interior that resembles a spaceship. They’re discovered, and after being able to flee they try reporting the incident to the local police station. A large circus in the forest, and alien clowns from outer space? Yeah, that’s believable of course. Or not. But even the police must realize that something funny is happening around here, when the Klowns begin attacking the townspeople. Why they’re attacking people? Because they’re hungry! And the people they capture are encased in large cotton-candy cocoons, where they drink the mushed-up fluids from inside in true spider-style (well, not exactly, they use drinking straws). Mike and Debbie know they must defeat the Klowns, but how? The answer is simple, of course: you need to shoot them in their red nose!
Killer Klowns from Outer Space is a colorful sci-fi horror comedy from 1988, written and directed by the Chiodo Brothers. They also made the practical effects and makeup for the movie, much of it also carried out by other artists. Thus, there’s a ton of practical effects, rubber suits and masks. It was filmed in Watsonville, California and at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and have pretty much been considered a cult classic for quite some time. There’s been talk of sequels, but they’ve been in development hell since the original film’s release. If there should ever be some kind of sequel, though, then at least it would be one people have wanted for some time, just like the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice movie.
Just looking at the title, the description, and the images of the Killer Klowns themselves, you can’t blame anyone but yourself if you watch this and expect something different than what it is. It’s pure childish, silly nonsense. Originally, the film was supposed to just be called Killer Klowns, but in order to prevent people from assuming it was a simple slasher film, they added the “from Outer Space“ just to let people know what they were in for. Good choice. It’s obviously both a parody and a homage to the 50’s and early 60’s sci-fi classics about alien and monster invasions.
The special effects are the movie’s most admirable part, where the Killer Klown costumes look pretty darn good. The acting is, well, very typical B-movie fare, which suits a film like this perfectly. And as you might expect, this being alien clowns and all, there’s gags aplenty and a lot of wild stupidity with popcorn-guns, shadow puppets eating people, and a lot of other loony stuff. While it’s hard to imagine anyone finding any moments in this movie to be scary in any way, the cotton-candy cocoons with melted human bodies inside is a little bit nasty. And yeah, there is a bit of gore here but there’s nothing really over the top. The film also has a pretty cool and campy theme song called Killer Klowns, performed by the pop/punk band The Dickies. Ah, theme songs! Those were the days.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space is just as deranged, absurd, childish and sickly sweet as you can imagine. You can almost feel a sugar-overdose after watching it, despite not having eaten any candy or ice cream at all. And in space no one can eat ice cream, or so the film’s slogan says. It’s had several DVD and Blu-ray releases over the years, and can be seen on several streaming sites.
Director: Stephen Chiodo
Writer: Charles Chiodo, Stephen Chiodo, Edward Chiodo
Country & year: USA, 1988
Actors: Grant Cramer, Suzanne Snyder, John Allen Nelson, John Vernon, Michael S. Siegel, Peter Licassi, Royal Dano, Christopher Titus, Irene Michaels, Irene Michaels, Karla Sue Krull
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095444/
We are in one of the darker corners of Hollywood, Los Angeles, where the young man Raymond Everett (Lenny Von Dohlen) owns a horror-themed wax museum. One day he gets some new deliveries, all the way from Romania, one of which is a casket that contains something you’ll never guess what – Vanessa, Dracula’s widow (Sylvia Kristel). Yes, a living, bloodsucking vampire. So why has she gotten herself all the way over to Los Angeles, you may wonder? No one knows. She doesn’t know, the script doesn’t know, even the Man Who Knows poster we see on the wall on Raymond’s apartment, doesn’t know. So where do we go from here? Who knows.
It’s a dark and stormy night when comic book artist Colin Childress (Jeffrey Combs) works on his horror series Cellar Dweller. He sets his final drops of ink on a sequence where a young, half-naked damsel in distress runs through the woods and ends up trapped by a satanic, hairy monster. After Colin randomly quotes some obscure phrases from a book of witchcraft, he unconsciously manages to summon both the monster and the damsel who emerges right behind his back. While Herbert West..uhm, sorry, I mean Colin, runs frightened out of his studio, the monster kills the damsel off-screen. Since the monster was summoned from the drawing paper, Colin gets the brilliant idea to set the artwork on fire, which escalates into an inferno that kills them both. The rest of his artwork manage to survive, though.
Carol Anne has now moved to her uncle and aunt at the John Hancock Center in Chicago where she attends a special school for gifted children and visits a psychologist regularly. She would prefer to not talk about the past, but the shrink hypnotizes her to do so and can assure Carol Anne that talking about the past will make it go away. In this case it makes the dark forces enter her life again and a certain scary old man starts to manifest in mirrors and reflections. To quote Tangina: He’s back!
